Alien Blitz: progress report

I’ve been working on porting Alien Blitz to iOS lately, first results were very good as it is working smoothly on my iPod touch (5th generation).

But there were some lags on iPhone 4 (first model) and I wanted it to work on this phone (I don’t really think I will support earlier models); so I optimized a lot of things, and while testing I found some interesting stuff concerning lights that were not cpu intensive.

Long story short, the new light model is a lot nicer than before:

Lights are smoother and more coloured than before. I’ve also updated all textures so that everything is brighter

And there are also plenty of small changes so far:

Updated first map, it is more easy to navigate for newbies

Lots of optimizations, roughly 50% quicker than before while playing (less lag in crowded area), 10% quicker to load, and 30% less memory

Updated all maps, height differences are now easier to see (water, lava & poison)

Corrected some small bugs

I’ve also split Snorms & Alien Blitz source code, they are not linked anymore, which made all the above changes easier to perform, but it also means I have to rewrite the whole release process; thankfully it is quite easy on Android (no exe/deb/sh/… to build)

I now have to rewrite the menus for iOS, so basically:

I will build a private beta version soon, with the above changes and the old menu system, this beta will be tested while working on other stuffs

If menus can be rewritten & tested before the end of the month, I will make a big update with everything

Otherwise I will publish the beta and there will be a new update for menus later